Crossing la Línea: Bodily Encounters with the US - México Border in Ambos Nogales (original) (raw)
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This article analyzes the effects of the Mexico-United States geopolitical border in social and cultural differentiation, using the crossing experience as the analytical core. Based in 60 life histories of residents of the Mexico-USA border region, a typology of life experiences structured around border crossing is developed, including a wide range of life experiences, from those that involve never having crossed the border to those that are precisely the product of border crossing. The experienced border encompasses the subjectified experience of the region, integrating both the meaning of crossing and the structural elements that historically have defined the border: proximity, asymmetry, and interaction.
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VITAL TOPICS FORUM Archaeology as Bearing Witness Edited by Mark W. Hauser This Vital Topics Forum looks at archaeology as a form of bearing witness. While bearing witness has been an important frame for scholarly interrogation of structural violence for some time (Agamben 1998; Butler 2016), it is perhaps Paul Farmer (2004) who popularized this way of scrutinizing structural violence. For Farmer, there are two ways to bear witness. The first is “to show the stoic suffering of the poor” (25). The second entails showing that suffering “is a consequence of structural violence that is immanent to the prevailing system and that links together apparently disconnected aspects of that system” (26).At its most general level, bearing witness is a valuable way to scrutinize violent encounters, traumatic events, dislocations, and structural inequalities. It can help obtain support from those who might feel distant from those events, diffuse pressure from communities most directly affected, and bring about change. Bearing witness can take the form of communicating traumatic personal experiences or documenting for others the dislocations, institutionalized violence, and kinds of difference-making that often escape social examination. Contributors build on these forms by arguing that bearing witness is part of an archaeological episteme. That is, as archaeologists, we produce accounts of the past. When we produce such accounts, we make choices about how they are narrated. Those choices, of course, are constrained by existing traditions, our positions in the field, and our political commitments. Most importantly, those accounts are limited by what we are trained to see as observers.
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Frontera Norte, 2014
This article analyzes the effects of the Mexico-United States geopolitical border in social and cultural differentiation, using the crossing experience as the analytical core. Based in 60 life histories of residents of the Mexico-USA border region, a typology of life experiences structured around border crossing is developed, including a wide range of life experiences, from those that involve never having crossed the border to those that are precisely the product of border crossing. The experienced border encompasses the subjectified experience of the region, integrating both the meaning of crossing and the structural elements that historically have defined the border: proximity, asymmetry, and interaction.
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